Monday, February 22, 2016

MWC 2016 - Alcatel Idol 4 and Idol 4S

Alcatel unveiled their idol 4 series of smartphone at MWC (today) . The two smartphones are basically successors to the popular Onetouch idol 3 launched last year and this year they are back with a bang (for your buck as well) .The company , owned by TCL has changed a few things around this time and so from now on Alcatel will not be using the "Onetouch" name on its products in order to make things short and sweet .

The new smartphones feature a familiar metal and glass design element from last year and it also retains the popular multi orientation functionality we saw last year with the idol 3 (this lets you use the phone even upside down as the whole UI changes as the front firing dual speakers double up as microphones as well (Alcatel has added two rear speakers making the total figure to 4 speakers) . The idol 4 smartphone retains Alcatel's 13mp rear camera while the 4s has a 16mp one , both feature a 8mp front facing one along with a front facing flash has been added to both versions , Both smartphones run Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon s6xx based 64bit processors and has Android 6.0 ,Although the phones look similar and share some common specs , the idol 4 and 4S are two completely different handsets and one can be regarded as a "flagship" in its own right .Pricing details are not out yet The smartphones come in a plastic box which can be used as a ad-hoc VR headset .

Alcatel OneTouch idol 4

This is Alcatel's "affordable" model out of the two , the handset features a a Snapdragon 617 Soc which is a Octacore A53 unit with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (MicroSD expansion is included) .The handset features a 5.2" 1080p LTPS (IPS) display as well as gorilla glass protection . The phone has a 13MP rear camera with a Sony sensor which focuses and shoots in 0.1 seconds , this sensor is capable of recording 1080p and it has a secondary front facing 8MP unit . The phone has a 2610 mAh non removable battery and it supports quick charging .

Alcatel OneTouch idol 4

The Onetouch idol 4 is Alcatel's best idol yet , the phone features a powerful Snapdragon 652 processor clocked to 1.8Ghz , the processor , a 6 core unit is one of the first processors to use ARM's next gen Cortex A72 cores which are superior to the Cortex A57 chip found on flagship smartphones today, the processor is backed by the Adreno 510 GPU .

The rest of the spec sheet includes 3GB of RAM , 32GB of storage (MicroSD card support is included) as well as a 5.5" 2560x1440p AMOLED display ,the phone also has two 3.6w speakers in front and it has the same 13MP sony camera and the 8MP front facing camera as the idol 4 . The handset however has a larger 3000 mAh battery which is non removable and supports quick charging